Forecasting crude oil prices in the COVID-19 era: Can machine learn better?

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, energy price predictability has worsened. We evaluate the effectiveness of the two machine learning methods of shrinkage and combination on the spot prices of crude oil before and during the COVID-19 epidemic. The results demonstrated that COVID-19 increased economic uncertainty and diminished the predictive capacity of numerous models. Shrinkage methods have always been regarded as having an excellent out-of-sample forecast performance. However, during the COVID period, the combination methods provide more accurate information than the shrinkage methods. The reason is that the outbreak of the epidemic has altered the correlation between specific predictors and crude oil prices, and shrinkage methods are incapable of identifying this change, resulting in the loss of information.